 . . . March 1995
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| THE SUSPENSION OF JAM HANDY |
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In Which a Professor is Ridiculed, a University President is Unforgiving, and a 17-year-old Freshman Receives Chastisement |
It was no easy task to get yourself kicked out of the University of Michigan in 1903. During the Freshman-Sophomore Rush back then, male students tied each other up in trees, and later, during the March haircutting craze, they sheared their victims' hair and still kept in good standing.
One fellow even pulled a revolver on schoolmates who played a practical joke on him and received no more punishment than a professor's warning that he risked "shooting a hole in your diploma." A pack of 500 young men teased some circus elephants and beat up a circus employee without losing the privilege of attending class the next day.
So it took some doing for a 17-year-old freshman, Henry Jamison (Jam) Handy, to become the first student to be suspended in the 1902-03 academic year. His offense? As a campus correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he published an article that May 8 in which he described a session of Elocution 2 given by Prof. Thomas C. Trueblood as a "course in lovemaking," and said Trueblood had dropped on bended knee to demonstrate how to make an effective proposal of marriage.
Trueblood was not amused. Nor was U-M President James B. Angell or the faculty that convened 10 days after the article appeared and ordered Handy's immediate suspension for a year. They saw Handy's article as dishonest and harmful.
Young Jam Handy left, never to attend another university. But he went on to become a two-time Olympic medal-winner and a world pioneer in the commercial use of film. Thanks to the purchase by the U-M Clements Library of the Handy family's papers, the story of his suspension can now be told. It is a story involving such issues as the civic mission of higher education, student rights and responsibilities, the University's reputation, its budget, community relations, media relations and student-faculty relations; in other words, issues that are as timely now as a century ago. The Student Handy had chosen Michigan over other colleges so he could use its new 60-foot pool to indulge his passion for swimming. When he presented himself to football coach Fielding Yost, he was offered a position--but as a mascot, not a player. The Handys were a journalistic family. Jam's father, Moses, who died when Jam was 13, had been a major in the Confederate army and a correspondent for newspapers in several cities. He organized the publicity for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and was also a syndicated columnist. Jam's mother, Sarah Matthews Handy, wrote on domestic life for the Ladies' Home Journal. Jam was the youngest of seven children, all of whom became journalists. When he arrived at Michigan, Jam Handy was a special correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where his brother William edited the Sunday edition. There were other student correspondents as well, among them Henry Blakeslee, who represented the Chicago American and the Detroit Journal. Student correspondents, called "campus stringers" today, have always given universities the willies. As Northwestern's dean, Thomas Holgate, wrote to Angell in the aftermath of the Handy affair: "The problem of student reporters is one of our most difficult ones at the present time... If you succeed in handling the problems of the student reporter, I shall be glad to come to Ann Arbor and sit for a week at the feet of your Faculty." Michigan did not forbid students from working as campus correspondents, so the correspondents felt no need to conceal their identities.  Thomas C. Trueblood was, as Handy was to become, a college dropout. After studying at Earlham College, he established an elocution and oratory school in Kansas City, Missouri, and branched out into teaching at Middle Western universities. He landed in Ann Arbor in 1884 and by 1892 Angell had made him chair of the new Department of Elocution and Oratory.
At the time of Handy's article, Trueblood was 47 and receiving one of the top U-M salaries, which reflected the civic and ethical, as well as educational, value attached to public speaking. But newspapers were fast encroaching on this gentlemanly preserve, and the Trueblood-Handy dispute mirrored the larger clash between the orator and the reporter. Three months before the Handy affair, for instance, the Michigan Daily felt it necessary to defend oratory against "the opinion that (it) is fast becoming one of the lost arts: "The field of the orator was never wider than today. The tremendous increase of newspapers and periodical literature of all kinds has not driven him out of business-far from it. They are aids in his work. They educate the general public and make it more receptive of his ideas. However much influence printed matter may have upon thought, men will always be more susceptible to the human voice that to any mechanical contrivance." In addition to his scholarly work, Trueblood organized and coached debate and oratory contest and gave dramatic readings on tours all over the world. That academic year he had just founded the U-M golf team. Trueblood continued as professor until 1926, when he as 70, and as golf coach till he was 80, when Yost named him emeritus coach.  James Burrill Angell had the longest tenure—1871 to 1909—of any U-M president so far. After receiving his BA and MA from Brown University--where he was a librarian and taught modern languages-- he left academia in 1860 to edit the Providence Journal as a staunch supporter of Lincoln and the Union.
Angell became president of the University of Vermont in 1866, received and honorary doctor of laws degree from Brown in 1868, and was the choice of Michigan's Board of Regents to assume the University's presidency in February 1871. In May 1903, Angell was 74. His wife, Sarah Caswell Angell--a popular and active friend of women students (who were admitted to the University in 1871, the year she, too, arrived in Ann Arbor)--was beginning to suffer from the illness that would take her life in December.
Handy described the fateful class from the vantage point of old age: "I had been carried away in my enthusiasm for a great advance in education on the part of the University of Michigan of which I felt they should be very proud. At that time I was enrolled in a literature class taught by Professor Thomas C. Trueblood. When the class became devastated by spring fever, he announced that he was going to have role-playing by the students, having them enact scenes of plays and novels, with the students playing the various parts, reading the dialogue aloud, etc. "At the time there were three newspaper correspondents in the room, one representing the Detroit Free Press, one the Jackson Citizen Patriot, and myself. Aroused by genuine enthusiasm for this innovation in education methods, I... filed a query to the Tribune and received an order for a 1,500-word news story on the new development. "The next day the class was packed with student visitors. Professor Trueblood said to the three correspondents, 'I don't want any publicity on this.' Having been trained in a newspaper family in the doctrine that the 'public has a right to know,' I ran all the way to the telegraph office and filed the story. Neither of the other writers sent in the story, so it was a 'scoop.' The story made national news." The story that appeared on the Tribune's May 8 front page did have a grain of truth to it--but that grain had sprouted some wild shoots. The headline was stacked high with breathless details: "Learn Sly Cupid's Tricks In paragraphs of supposed conversation, the Tribune led its readers to believe that Trueblood was not instructing his students on the best way for the roles of "Clifford" and "Julia" to be acted, but, rather, the best way for the male students to win a young woman's hand:
"No, kneel on both knees—now hold her hand, it impresses her more—so...Now, you wouldn't accept him if he couldn't do better than that, would you, Miss?...Get on your knees gracefully; like this, you see. Reach over and grasp her hand with both of yours—both mind; then make your proposal, but make it as a man, not as if you didn't half mean it."
According to Handy's reminiscences, Trueblood called him to his office a week later:
"His desk was piled high with letters...and clippings...from around the country...and he also had a copy of the McCutcheon cartoon. (He) was taking all of this as ridicule, although I had publicized the story with sincere enthusiasm for a new advance in education of which I felt the University of Michigan should be proud."
Handy and Trueblood disagreed, among other things, as to whether Trueblood had admitted kneeling in class only to deny it later after learning that Angell disapproved of such behavior in a faculty member.
To Angell it was an issue of Handy's apparent failure to acknowledge that the story was essentially false, that it was bound to subject Trueblood and the University to ridicule, and that it constituted a breach of trust with the professor's request that the class activities remain off the record. "There are commonplace thinkers who will pitch on things like this haircutting. They will say, 'What, pay to support barbarians, wild animals?'...A thing like this is bound to hurt the University...The students can now do more harm to this institution than long lives could possibly redress...In view of the public opinion of the state, I appeal to this class to stop it." But there was no stopping the Chicago Tribune's sensationalizing of the Trueblood story. Clearly, the newspapers throughout the nation were using the university angle of the story as a means to keep sexual subject matter, however tame, on feature pages. On May 12, the Tribune ran a photograph of Trueblood with this caption: "Trueblood has nearly worn out his trousers at the knees, showing young men how to kneel, and has strained his voice and eyes in efforts to show his pupils how to throw fire and passion into their appeals." On May 18 the faculty of the Literary College took up the matter and voted unanmimously to suspend Handy for a year for "publishing false and injurious statements affecting the character of the work of one of the Professors." Angell sat down that very day and wrote Handy's mother that her son had been "directed to leave town at once, and I trust you will call him home." Handy's family protested that the Univerisity had no right to take away Jam's means of earning a living by driving him away from town. Angell replied, however, that a young man with no regular work "is in danger of falling into idle and vicious habits," and that it would be "demoralizing to other students to see that a student under discipline is hanging about the place in idleness." Although Angell had led Michigan to the top rank of public universities in the country, its budget was always vulnerable. Throughout 1903, newspapers in the state had expressed alarm about the effect of the sensational stories being issued from the campus to the press. The Daily sided with the University president. It said that the fanciful stories might "reach the hands of some fond parent who, in his simple agricultural pursuits, fails to doubt (the accuracy of the stories) and his son goes off to some other institution." Competing universities, especially Chicago with its generous funding by the Rockefeller family, were luring away faculty to the extent, the Daily complained, that "Michigan has become... a mere training school for the monied universities of the country." Three weeks after the Trueblood story broke, Angell met with the Legislature and attacked the budget-cutting proposal: "This isn't my university. It isn't the university of the president and the professors. It is the state's university. If the state really wants a cheaper university, why, the state ought to have it." The Daily reported on May 29 that "Suave 'Prexy' Angell" had stopped the bill with his persuasive arguments. Blakeslee's stories for the Chicago American about the student haircutting depredations included as many seemingly made-up conversations as Handy's had about Trueblood. But Blakeslee was not accused of violating a professor's request for privacy. What's more, he convinced the faculty that he had been misled by his informants and apologized for his errors. Perhaps that explains why the vote to suspend him was 17 to 6 and not unanimous. Handy, however, applied for readmission that fall of 1903. He was turned down. Rather than sit out a year, he decided to try to enroll in another school, perhaps planning to return to Michigan with more credits, or maybe to finish elsewhere. But he learned that Angell's suspension was respected far from Ann Arbor. As an old man, Handy recalled applying to Ivy League and other Big Ten colleges only to find, as he put it, that "it seemed they had been told I was an agitator." Finally, he was admitted to Wharton College of Business Administration at the University of Pennsylvania. After attending classes for two weeks, he was called into Dean Penniman's office: "(Penniman) said that had he known my father who had been the editor of the Philadelphia Press...and went on to say that he knew my father was a 'gentleman' and that presumably I was a 'gentleman' also. Then, he remarked that gentlemen do not stay where they are not wanted and that I was not wanted at the University of Pennsylvania." Handy had disclosed to Penn that he had been suspended by Michigan for writing "an objectionable article." Penniman contacted Angell and asked him whether "it is undesirable in your opinion for us to admit Mr. Handy to this institution." Angell's response has not been found, but after receiving it, Penniman wrote back to Angell, "In view of your letter, it was decided not to admit Mr. Handy." Medill McCormick, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, wrote Angell attempting to intervene on Handy's behalf. It appears that McCormick had been led to believe that Handy had been ssupended simply because he was a campus correspondent. "Will you be good enough to give me the facts in the case of H.G.(sic) Handy expelled from Michigan University (sic) for writing an article which appeared in the Chicago Tribune... Is it true that employment as a correspondent disbars an undergraduate from the University?" Angell repeated the grounds and terms of the suspension, whereupon McCormick, feeling, as he had written to Angell, "a measure responsible for his (Handy's) welfare," wired Handy to return to Chicago for a job with the paper. A job, he added, that would give the youth "an education as good as you could get in any university." Handy returned to Chicago (see accompanying story) and plunged into Olympic swimming and into a career in the new fields of advertising and visual communication, to which he made outstanding contributions. As for the rest of the cast of characters, Trueblood (whose unpublished memoirs make no mention of the Handy affair) left for a trip giving dramatic readings on the Pacific Coast. James B. Angell nursed his dying wife and remained president until 1909. Cartoonist John T. McCutcheon was hired away from the Record-Herald by McCormick's Tribune less than a month after his cartoon about Trueblood. And Henry Blakeslee returned to the University that September, graduated and became a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the Associated Press. Linda Robinson Walker '66 MSA is a freelance writer who lives in Ann Arbor.
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The next day, Chicago Record- Herald cartoonist John T. McCutcheon weighed in with a three-panel rendering of "Professor Foxy Truesport" dreaming up ways to "teach his class how to properly make love."
Trueblood included the scene in his 1893 textbook, Practical Elements of Elocution, to demonstrate the "Aspirate Explosive" form of speech for such "Vito-Emotive sentiments as intense fear, terror and consternation." The passage called for kneeling, and Trueblood's textbook prescribed the correct positioning of the feet for kneeling.